Wheeling Gull Isle wanderer, what are you searching for?

“See-lie.”

It was halting and uncertain, but Coelacanth rejoiced in it regardless, her sumi-e brush tail wriggling and whipping behind her as she bathed the strange male’s face — feverishly now, in time with the quickening thrum of her cunicular heart. It seemed to her that he began to drift off again, but in the next moment he gasped aloud, waterlogged lungs greedily sucking air and expelling it on a string of words she did not understand: “Nahin! Nando kahaan hai? Mere dost Nando?”

Tufted ears folded sharply against the sheepdog’s gently sloping skull as she half-recoiled, huddling in the sand with her eyes squinted and most of her frail weight settled upon her tightly coiled hindquarters. The salt in the air caused her feathery fur to bristle into a halo of inky quills, and she looked for all the world like a bewildered kitten who’d just been sprayed with a water bottle to discourage counter surfing. Nervously she licked her lips, looking up at the towering wolf with a significant amount of trepidation. Even when it became clear to her that he wasn’t going to eat her face off, she treated him with a certain wariness — but she did not run from him.

“Nando?” she parroted in a hesitant whisper, wanting desperately to appease him. There’d been a peculiar amount of emphasis on that word, but she didn’t think it was his name. She imagined that he was saying something along the lines of, “Where am I? Tell me where!” but she couldn’t be sure. An anxious whine stirred in her throat, airy and uncertain.

If he could walk, she thought it was best for him to move inland, away from the shoreline. As much as she loved it, the sea could be unforgiving, and he would need clean water and fresh food to settle his stomach from the brine. Too, there were warm dens for the stranded that Komodo and Stockholm had helped to excavate and furnish. “Friend,” she entreated in a timorous susurrus. Daringly, she made to touch the tip of her nose to one tawny shoulder, the lupine equivalent of timidly tugging at his sleeve. Then she moved a pace or two away, angling her slim muzzle suggestively, before circling back to his side in case he needed to lean on her. She was tiny — a poor walking stick for such a burly wolf — but her Neptune eyes were gamely determined.